For the week of March 25th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Aquaman to Blu-ray. Depending on your preference for Man of Steel or Wonder Woman, Aquaman is either the second or third best of Warner and DCU's post-Dark Knight slate. It's also certainly the silliest, and after the edgelord stylings of both Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad, that lightness of spirit is not a bad thing. Warner heavily courted Conjuring director James Wan to helm this behemoth, and Wan seems just as committed to not taking the whole endeavor too seriously as he is in crafting high-octane action sequences. The opening flashback shows how Aquaman's mother (Nicole Freakin' Kidman) and father (Temuera Morrison) met, and Wan uses it to stage a full-on Splash homage, of all things, as Kidman's out-of-water Atlantean goofily reacts to the strangeness of earthbound civilization. When Wan introduces Aquaman (Jason Momoa) punching away at terrorists on a submarine, we could be watching a self-aware Steven Seagal parody, although even that isn't as funny as the strange and wonderful diversity of the sea's many kingdoms and royal species. At one point, Aquaman takes a selfie and gets wasted with a bar full of bikers; as another, he offers to pee on an ancient MacGuffin. And Julie Andrews voices the damn Kraken! Ultimately, all this humor works: there is so much about Aquaman lore that is inherently ridiculous, and by inviting us in on the joke, Wan honors his source material without ridiculing it. What bothers me, however, is how lumbering and unintentionally messy everything surrounding the comedy is. No one sounds all that interesting in Aquaman - when people talk, they exclusively relay backstory and plot beats, and it's dispiriting to watch talented performers like Kidman, Patrick Wilson (as the film's villain), and Willem Dafoe (playing Aquaman's wily mentor) reduced to dispensing exposition. That said, the exposition problem plagues many four-quadrant tentpoles (Captain Marvel also has way too much of it), making Aquaman a symptom rather than the disease itself. But why can't Wan get anything that interesting out of Momoa or Amber Heard (playing the boring love interest/sidekick), or how come he and screenwriter Will Beall seem to have built their film out of parts from other movies? I mentioned Splash already; I could just as easily mention Black Panther (in terms of the dynamic between hero and villain), How to Train Your Dragon 2 (how Kidman ultimately factors into the plot), a little Indiana Jones (globetrotting looking for clues), and even a dash of Alien, believe it or not (the Trench monsters that let Wan stretch his Conjuring muscles). Aquaman wears its influences a bit too heavily, and so it never feels like its own movie. But hey: at least it's not Suicide Squad.
In his Blu-ray review, Randy Miller III wrote that the film is "like four movies in one, and only half of them are any good. Yet Aquaman has its moments: Jason Momoa's charisma and pecs will be more than enough for some, the overwhelming amount of CGI is a feast for the eyes - until you're stuffed to the gills but forced to keep eating, of course - and the underwater vistas are truly astonishing. This film also has the good sense to not take itself too seriously and, while the comedy's a bit thick at times and some of the Game of Thrones-lite politics could've easily been dropped, as a whole it's still pretty watchable. Overall, Aquaman is just a lot to take in and would have been a lot easier to stomach in smaller portions. In comparison to other big-budget superhero blockbusters, Aquaman might be closer to a 3.5/5 and, on a great day, might even snag a 4. As a regular old nuts-and-bolts story, it's seriously flawed in certain areas and there are far too many seams showing to go unnoticed."
Barry Jenkins' Academy Award-winning Moonlight follow-up If Beale Street Could Talk also hits physical-media outlets this week. That Jenkins' formal mastery of staging and mise-en-scène remains as breathtaking as it was in Moonlight should surprise no one. Outside of Jonathan Demme, no one gets as much out of a close-up as Jenkins does. You can feel his camera swooning right alongside his doomed lovers Fonny and Tish (Stephan James and KiKi Layne, respectively) as it pitches and glides around actions both beautiful and heartbreaking. Speaking of camerawork, this might be the most beautiful color film I've seen since Far from Heaven. In approximating the look of '70s Provia film, DP James Laxton creates a smeary, hyper-saturated color palette that reflects the roiling emotional shifts inside the characters. And my god, Nicholas Britell's score is practically a character itself in the film. It's a gliding, unsettled thing, flowing from classical to free-form jazz to ambient electronica, sometimes in the space of just a few bars. Britell's sonic landscape says as much about the instability of 1970s Harlem for black people as James Baldwin's original novel does. Where I struggle is with the clash between Jenkins and Co.'s expressionistic A/V style and the literal text of Baldwin's novel. Jenkins might be the most successful filmmaker alive in terms of his ability to realize ineffable emotional states (the flush of first love; the pang of shocking injustice), yet in his attempt to honor Baldwin (and who wouldn't want to?), Jenkins overrelies on dialogue, underlining that which is best left mysterious, elusive. Layne has a voiceover track pulled straight from Baldwin's text, and as beautiful as the words are, we don't need them. Better to rely on the actors, I suppose. Layne and James are props more than anything, but their faces seemed time-stamped with every cruelty and blessing their characters face; the way James intones "Do you know what's happening TO ME" when he's speaking of his prison experience is a masterclass in burying unspeakable hurts into the absolute minimum amount of syllables. So it goes with people like Michael Beach, Colman Domingo, and the great Regina Hall, all of whom function like mood rings gauging our protagonists' trauma. Best might be the great Brian Tyree Henry. As Daniel, a recently paroled ex-con and Fonny's friend, Henry shows up for maybe ten minutes, burns a hole in the negative, and then vanishes. It's one of the great one-scene movie performances, but more than that, it's If Beale Street Could Talk in microcosm: this almost-whisper-still recanting of unimaginable hurts. When Daniel speaks of his prison experience, it's so painful that we don't want to listen, and so we might miss that Baldwin and Jenkins are using him to chart the rest of the movie's whole thematic journey. But Henry commands our attention all the same, and he leaves a quiet wake of devastation in his absence.
Paramount Home Media Distribution might only be releasing this 4K edition of Pet Sematary to help promote the upcoming new adaptation (5 April, if it interests you), but I'm still happy to have it on Blu-ray anyways. This 1989 chiller is one of the most iconic bad movies ever made. If I'm being objective, little about Pet Sematary works. The effects are a little hokey (I've always thought that the FX artists glued a rare piece of steak to actor Brad Greenquist's head for his Victor Pascow makeup); the direction is a little flat (it's hard to believe that Mary Lambert was responsible for Madonna's uber-stylish "Material Girl" and "Like a Prayer" music videos based on her work here); and with the exception of Fred Gwynne's terrific supporting turn, the performances are beyond flat - leads Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby feel like placeholders until the production could find more dynamic actors. Yet the film retains this dread and wonderful allure. Part of that, we can credit direct to Stephen King's source novel. Pet Sematary has one of King's best horror premises - a cursed pet cemetery that can bring back anything you bury in it, but it brings 'em back bad - that King develops to almost nihilistically brutal effect. The book is so dark he almost didn't publish it (I suspect this is an apocryphal story, but when King showed a rough draft to his wife Tabitha, she told him, "You should probably just burn that"), and the film does nothing to soften the story's nastiest edges. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the last fifteen minutes are formative for a whole generation of horror geeks. We experience the genre assuming so many things about who is and isn't safe from peril, and Pet Sematary exploits these assumptions with sadistic glee. So yeah, the film moves and looks like an especially poky episode of Tales from the Crypt, but when it commits to the darkness, it never looks back. Well played, movie. Well played.
Of the film, Martin Liebman noted that "Pet Sematary is one of the more chilling of Stephen King's tales, a decidedly dark and uncomfortable glimpse into tragedy, the supernatural, and the lengths to which man will go to save that and those which he loves. The movie is eerie and foreboding. It's very well crafted, nicely acted, and quite gripping and uneasy even as the picture lacks much in the way of real dramatic surprise. Paramount's UHD features a terrific new 4K/Dolby Vision restoration as well as a few new extras."
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Harold Ramis' high-concept farce Multiplicity to Blu-ray. Even though Ramis would have guaranteed himself a place in Comedy Heaven with Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day alone, I still wish the rest of his filmmaking career was a little less erratic. For every Analyze This or National Lampoon's Vacation, we'd have a Year One or Multiplicity. I love the hook: after trying and failing - to balance his high-maintenance construction job with the demands of his family, beleaguered everyman Doug Kinney (Michael Keaton) enrolls in an experimental cloning program that allows him to make three more copies of himself. Complications arise, naturally, although they tend to follow the most pedestrian template possible. For a film with this many credited writers (National Lampoon's Chris Miller penned the short story that inspired the film; he then wrote a draft alongside Ramis and Mary Hale; and then Sony brought in Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz to punch up that draft), way too much of Multiplicity wallows in sexual politics that would have felt tired in a mid-'80s French farce. To wit: Doug's one rule to his other selves is that they can't sleep with his wife (Andie MacDowell, predictably charming), so of course all of them end up breaking this rule and then trying to keep MacDowell none the wiser. You keep waiting for Ramis to activate that same brilliant humanist-satirist bent that galvanized Groundhog Day, but he never really does. Still, his work merits a light pass, if only for getting such an inspired turn from Keaton. Long one of Hollywood's nerviest comic performers, Keaton hadn't headlined a true comedy since 1989's The Dream Team, and he seems liberated riffing as the four Dougs. Forget the fact that the clones, as written, exist as fairly one-dimensional sketches (the butch one; the effete one; the developmentally disabled one) - Keaton gives them so many different quirks that we buy their relationship to one another and the world around them. It's a great piece of acting in a movie that doesn't quite deserve it.
Finally, Criterion is welcoming Robert Zemeckis to the collection with its wonderful new release of his debut feature I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Before Back to the Future turned Zemeckis into one of Hollywood's hottest mainstream filmmakers, he and writing partner Bob Gale were trying to make a name for themselves as anarchic farceurs. Think of their script for Steven Spielberg's freewheeling 1941 or the Frank Capra-piss take that is Used Cars: Zemeckis and Gale practically made Mad Magazine lampoons of pop culture. And I Wanna Hold Your Hand helped set the template for much of their subsequent stylistic obsessions. Step 1: find a pop-culture obsession. As the title suggests, this film hinges around Beatle-mania, charting the impact the Fab Four made when they played on Ed Sullivan's 9 February 1964 program. Step 2: adopt a ground-level perspective. The reason we love Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Forrest Gump, for example, is because Zemeckis filters his pop-culture icons through the little people in their orbit. In this case, we've got six unruly teenagers (Marc McClure, Susan Kendall Newman, Theresa Saldana, and then the 1941 vets Nancy Allen, Bobby Di Cicco, and Wendie Jo Sperber) who have made it their mission to break into The Ed Sullivan Show and see the band. Any Used Cars fan can attest to how good Zemeckis and Gale are at writing for ensembles, and these crazy kids ping off one another so well. Sperber, in particular, gives a Melissa McCarthy-in-Bridesmaids-level comic turn as the group's most unhinged Beatles fan - her scenes with the great/obnoxious Eddie Deezen (playing a fellow obsessive) function like its own madcap short film. Step 3: turn them loose. I Wanna Hold Your Hand is a little less rigorously structured in its plotting than Back to the Future, yet its third act has a similar clockwork precision as Zemeckis and Gale start paying off all the gags and setups they've so carefully been building. Plus, the presence of executive producer Steven Spielberg means I Wanna Hold Your Hand feels bigger than its $2.8-million budget. Spielberg let Zemeckis shoot inserts on the set of 1941, and - oh yeah - he helped secure the licensing rights to the Beatles' songs. Still, I said Zemeckis and Gale were "trying to make a name for themselves"; unfortunately, Universal bungled the marketing rollout for the film, and it virtually vanished from cinemas. But it's a far sweeter, daffier, and more entertaining feature than its reputation might suggest, and richly deserving of a rediscovery.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "Zemeckis and Bob Gale mix equal doses of nostalgia and sarcasm that make this film virtually impossible to dislike. Yes, there is a fair amount of silliness in it that is also part of its identity, but underneath it there is a genuine understanding and appreciation of the Beatlemania that rocked the country. This is the reason why the end product actually feels surprisingly authentic - it gets the vibe and flavor of the event right. The rest is part of and functions as a colorful 'wrapper' that Zemeckis and Gale simply use to present the two to their audience. The acting is very loose but also incredibly enthusiastic and it infuses the film with a remarkable steady energy. However, the real catalyst behind it is actually Zemeckis, who carefully unleashes and then manages the energy so that it never collapses the film. It is a pretty remarkable accomplishment because it was his directorial debut and yet it is absolutely impossible to detect any areas that might have been marred by amateur indecisiveness or sloppy compromises. In fact, this is exactly the type of polished effort that one would rightfully expect to appear late in the career of a seasoned pro. (The exact same looseness that is highlighted above is also present in John Hughes' beloved classic comedies, only in these films the energy is routinely traded for a very authentic and equally attractive sense of intimacy)."